Edging Back to Nuclear Power

The construction site for the Southern Company's Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Waynesboro, Ga. Regulators have received 17 applications from companies that want to build 26 new reactors. Credit
Stephen Morton for The New York Times 30094782A 30095001A 30095998A

FOR the first time since the 1970s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced a step that it once took routinely: appointing an inspector for a new reactor construction project.

With 17 applications in hand from companies that want to build 26 reactors, the agency is likely to name a lot more inspectors; it also expects five more applicants in the next few years.

Is this the long-awaited renaissance of the nuclear construction business, after years of being moribund?

Certainly, some crucial ingredients are falling into place. Nuclear power provides 70 percent of the nation’s carbon-free electricity, important at a time when environmentalists track carbon in the atmosphere the way baby boomers check their cholesterol levels. And while Congress has not agreed on setting a price on carbon emissions, important people say we need more low-carbon power. President Obama said in his State of the Union address that it was time to build “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country,” and his budget plan would triple the pool of loan guarantees available for construction, to $57.5 billion.

Near Augusta, Ga., where the Southern Company opened its Vogtle 1 and 2 reactors in 1987 and 1989, workers have cleared away storage sheds and are preparing a site for construction of units 3 and 4. Vogtle received the first loan guarantees, $8.3 billion, under a program enacted in 2005; the five years that have passed are an indication of the pace of the renaissance.

Yet, undeniably, there is progress. Parts have been ordered from as far away as Italy and Japan, and there are stirrings in the supply chain here, suggesting that, while the United States can no longer manufacture all the key components, it can at least contribute to a global system. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved the Vogtle site, and a legion of its engineers and those at Westinghouse, the designer, are hashing out details before a new kind of license can be issued — one that will allow cookie-cutter copies of the reactor around the country. Generic approvals for other designs are at various stages.

Boosters of nuclear power want to repeat the 1970s, with dozens of orders a year; Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, has called for building 100 plants, which would more than double existing capacity, just as the United States did from 1970 to 1990. And there appears to be bipartisan support for new reactors.

Some longtime opponents, like Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said they still do not like the technology but would hold their noses and take a package that included some of what they want. Mr. Markey, who with Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote the climate bill that passed the House last year, has been an implacable critic of the industry for decades. But if support for new reactors is the price of getting Senate agreement to a carbon cap, he said in an interview, he would negotiate over that.

Representative John Hall, a Democrat from the Hudson Valley of New York, was a popular musician in the 1970s in the band Orleans and starred, with Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt, in a series of concerts at Madison Square Garden that raised $1 million to oppose nuclear power. He still dislikes the technology but has cast votes to help the industry, in bills that also contained subsidies for renewable energy.

“The unfortunate truth, speaking as somebody who is skeptical of nuclear power, is that we probably need to do everything, and we probably need to do it fast,” he said.

Unlike the 1970s, when nuclear power’s role was to reduce oil consumption, now there is some ambiguity. What new reactors would mostly replace is coal and some natural gas. These have both been cheap lately, while nuclear power has a cost both certain to be high and hard to predict precisely. The newer justification for nuclear power is preventing climate change, but the industry may have hitched itself to an untested imperative.

“They say, ‘You know, we’ve really got to save the planet, and this is the panacea for supplying tons of power, 24/7, to address climate change forever,’ ” said Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, a coalition of public power agencies based in Tallahassee. “That’s what the industry has been hanging its hat on, but the climate debate has been floundering.”

A mild summer, a cold winter, some leaked e-mail messages and some evident errors in climate change reports have created doubts, justifiable or not, about the urgency of controlling carbon emissions, he said. With the setbacks in his state and elsewhere, if there is a nuclear renaissance “it’s going to be a crawl instead of a run,” he said.

Meanwhile, the recession has cut the demand for electricity for two years running, reducing the need to build anything at all. And in what might be a more worrisome development for the industry, even the continued operation of some existing reactors is not assured.

In Vermont, the State Senate voted overwhelmingly to close a 38-year-old reactor, Vermont Yankee, and would have to reverse itself to allow operation beyond 2012. It took the vote even though the plant is crucial to the state’s ability to meet its carbon-dioxide goals under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, sort of a mini-Kyoto agreement.

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An illustration of the Vermont Yankee plant, where leaks of radioactive water were discovered. Lawmakers in the state have voted to close the plant.Credit
ENTERGY VERMONT YANKEE....

In New York, another signatory to the regional agreement, the Department of Environmental Conservation, may be doing the same thing at Indian Point, complaining that the cooling system sucks in fish and fish eggs from the Hudson River. An environmental group is using the same argument to try to close four reactors in California.

Thus the existing reactors, potential models for expansion, are beginning to look like heirlooms, vintage technology from the age of slide rules, eight-track tapes and moon landings.

At Vermont Yankee, an old wooden cooling tower collapsed in 2007, not threatening the plant’s ability to shut down safely, but looking just awful. After leaks of radioactive water were found at an Illinois plant, the whole industry went looking for similar leaks and Vermont Yankee found them. The leaks do not appear to have produced any detectable dose of radiation, but plant officials had wrongly assured the state that they had no buried pipes that could leak.

While Vermont Yankee demonstrates the ability of a single plant to squander public trust, it also demonstrates the emergence of the states in nuclear regulation. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave primacy to the federal government. But when members of the Vermont Senate voted to decline to provide a new “certificate of public good,” a requirement for any power plant, they argued that the plant could not be reliable beyond its initial 40-year operating period. The plant, though, has been running more than 500 days without a shutdown.

Underlying public attitudes about nuclear power is, if not fear, at least lingering anxiety. This is the industry that gave American English the all-purpose term for disaster, from the financial markets to a toddler’s tantrum: meltdown. The recent deaths of 29 coal miners in West Virginia, of six construction workers at a natural gas plant in Connecticut in February and of five maintenance workers at a hydroelectric plant in Colorado in October 2007 have not shaken the popular conception that it is nuclear power that is dangerous. This seems to be true even as the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, before many Americans living today were born, fades into memory.

“The nuclear industry is just so far removed from people’s lives, they don’t have much feeling for it,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “They don’t really trust it. Although it hasn’t done anything recently to lose the general public’s trust, it hasn’t done anything to gain people’s trust.”

But if friends are not appearing, at least tolerance is evident. A Gallup poll in March showed that 62 percent of Americans, a new high, favor the use of nuclear power.

“There’s more public acceptance of nuclear power today than there has been at any time in my professional career,” said Alan Hanson, a 30-year industry veteran now with the American subsidiary of Areva, the French reactor maker. He added, though, “you can’t buy a nuclear reactor with public acceptance.”

Mr. Hanson’s company sells a reactor that several American companies would like to build, and one company, Unistar, is in line to get federal loan guarantees to help pay for it. But Unistar, a joint venture of Électricité de France, the French national electric company, and Constellation Energy, the parent company of Baltimore Gas and Electric, has not actually committed to build the plant. Among the elements of such calculations are whether Congress will pass legislation on carbon-dioxide emissions, which would help their project by handicapping the competition; the overall demand for power; and the price of natural gas, which is always volatile but has been especially low lately, partly because new drilling techniques have raised the amount of gas believed to be available.

One symptom of the national ambivalence about nuclear power is that American industry no longer has the ability to build 100 reactors itself; the American steel industry no longer has the capacity to build the biggest parts, the reactor vessels. These giant pots are about 40 feet high and 12 feet in diameter. In existing reactors, they were formed by casting flat steel plates eight inches thick, then bending them into curves, and then welding the plates together into rings. The rings were then stacked to form a cylinder; a top and bottom were attached and the product, running into the hundreds of tons, shipped by barge to a reactor site.

But the welds turned out to be vulnerable to damage over time, as neutrons, the subatomic particles that maintain the chain reaction, strayed out of the core and hit the metal, slowly making it brittle. And inspecting the welds is extremely cumbersome. So the reactor operators, in a wish list compiled 20 years ago, said that if they ever bought new vessels, they’d like them without many welds.

As a result, the new vessels are cast in rings, but American steel mills can’t make those. Given enough time and the promise of enough demand, they could gear up to do so, but the industry was dormant for so long that it hardly noticed that the new requirements exceeded its abilities.

Most such parts come from Japan Steel Works, which takes 600-ton steel ingots and presses them like Play Doh into the appropriate shape. It recently installed its second press and planned to be able to build 12 reactor vessels a year.

For an American company to do the same would require an enormous capital investment.

“I don’t know why anybody would,” said David M. Ratcliffe, the chief executive of Southern, who said it would not be worth the effort unless the market looked a lot bigger than it did right now.

In a sign of the new energy landscape, ArcelorMittal, the company that owns Lukens Steel, which built most of the reactor vessels for existing American plants, has been in talks with Westinghouse over a different part of that company’s new design, for the type of reactor that is planned for Vogtle. The design calls for stacking 13-foot wide steel strips laid out like stripes on an American flag, to build a dome 130 feet high. The steel strips are a bit wider than ArcelorMittal can handle, and the talks are over whether the part can be redesigned.

The company could invest in its factories to make wider plates, or even vessels, but it is not sure the market is there.

“We’re not really sure where this is going,” said Shelby Pixley, chief executive of ArcelorMittal USA Plate. The company also makes steel towers for wind machines, Mr. Pixley said, and he said he believed that business would continue to grow, but “at this point we’re not really sure what the winner is going to be at the end.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2010, on page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: Edging Back to Nuclear Power. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe